On 10/4/2016 2:37 PM, Winston, Alan P. via Callers wrote:
Its really tempting to cancel a contra if you only have a few people, but you don't want to punish the people who showed up - they may have foregone other options for their evenings. And there's a sense of triumph if you can show them a good time. I think its important to have options ready to go, so you can start on an energetic note and keep things happening, and if any new person shows up they see something going on rather than nothing and maybe stick around to get in the next one.
This is reminding me of a dance I did last year. I had hauled my way through 2 hours of grisly Bay Area traffic and got there just barely in time, completely frazzled, set list in hand, to find 3 dancers plus the dance manager. (Bay Area folks will know about the Canyon Contra, which ran for many, many years in the 1-room schoolhouse in Canyon, CA. Teeny but cool.) Just as I was about to pull out a couple of 2-couple English dances one more person showed up, so I danced in and we did a couple of triplets, then a waltz-time 3-couple English and a bouncy 3-couple English. I was mentally riffling through my triplet collection again when 3 more dancers showed up. Hooray, I had a dance for 9 (Pride of Dingle)! We took a little break after that, got 1 more dancer on the floor and did a few teeny contras, then another waltz-time dance for 3 couples. After the next break the manager had to go do manager things and we lost a couple of early-to-bed dancers so we did Domino 5 (I dearly love that dance), another triplet and ended with a goofy French-Canadian dance called Le Brandy. The folks who were first-timers were impressed that there were dances in "so many different shapes," and the experienced dancers were impressed that I was able to find ways to keep us all dancing. It ended up being a really, really enjoyable night.
A couple of years ago I took all of the dances I use for one night stand gigs and put them into a single document with ultra-compressed notation. I've sorted them by numbers, style, level of difficulty and a few other ways. That document has saved my butt a few times. If you've got a handful of go-to dances for odd situations, it's worth putting them all onto one easy-to-grab page for those times of need.
Kalia
